oh, it was tough waking up this morning at 7am.  i could have slept another few hours, but we had to get up to grab breakfast and head to the bus station.  our next stop in the tour was tartu where the largest and oldest university (ulikooli in estonian) is located.  tartu is also considered the spiritual part of estonia.  many of the events important to the national awakening occurred in tartu, such as the creation of the flag, the first Estonian song festival and the first Estonian language newspaper.

the bus ride was uneventful.  i slept and wrote.  the countryside was desolate, flat and green with an overcast sky.  i saw a few quaint cottages and windmills. 

we were dropped off at the bus station in tartu and transferred to a taxi to take us to the hotel.  the hotel was about a 15 minute ride from tartu out into the countryside.

at this point, since we were in tartu for one day, i had the guide book out to prioritize sights, restaurants and bars.  the plan was to have a couple hours for exploring and grabbing lunch, have a guided tour of tartu, free time and then dinner at a place called the gun powder cellar.  the tour leader gave us some ideas on what to do and see during the free time, which i translated to what wouldn’t be on the tour, and we should check out on our own before the tour.

we walked into the town square as a group and stopped in front of the kissing students.  the statue is of a man and woman kissing underneath an umbrella.  the umbrella depicts the most common type of weather in tartu, and it rained intermittently all day with at times raining so much that it saturated my umbrella to the point where the rain started coming through the fabric. 

we were told to meet back at the kissing students at 2pm for the tour.  the guide book said the university cafe was a gem of tartu, so we headed over to the cafe to grab lunch and coffee.  the cafe was very nice with exposed brick, large windows, dark wood, and a simple buffet of different casseroles and salads.  i would say it was pretty close to an estonian lunch. 

one of the places to the tour leader mentioned to check out was the student lock up.  in the 19th century, if a student broke a rule, they were held in solitary confinement in a room in the attic of the main university building.  If you failed to return a library book, 2 days; insulting a lady, 4 days; duelling, up to 3 weeks.  while serving time, the “prisoners” wrote graffiti on the walls, and today, one of the rooms is open for viewing for a small fee.

however, the guide book didn’t tell us about how difficult it was to find the place.  we circled the university building looking for the entrance before going inside.  the interior maps didn’t suggest the location.  so, we asked the information booth in the lobby.  we had to walk down to the art museum, pay the lady 50 kroons (5 dollars), and another lady escorted us up four flights of stairs to the attic where a series of doors led to the room. 

what a pain, but it was worth it.  the room was covered in drawings.  there were 5 rooms in all and during a fire, 3 were destroyed and 2 were partially destroyed.  the one we were viewing was rebuilt and about half of the graffiti we saw was redrawn from photos. 

afterwards, we walked around the town, went on the bridge over the emajogi river, and walked up to the angel bridge before returning to the kissing students to meet our tour guide.

the tour guide was a lively, young woman, on the left in the photo and our tour leader, adam, is on the right, who lives in tartu and went to school at the university.  she took us through the town square, pointing out the leaning building (the door is straight and so are the floors inside; lots of work went into saving the building from sinking 1 mm a year into the soft mud), st. john’s church with the little sculptures embedded into the wall, cathedral hill, the angel bridge and devil bridge, and statues. 

after the tour, we left the group to grab a coffee at the wilde cafe and bar, named after oscar wilde.  the establishment was huge with dark wood and a terrace out back.  it was still raining so we took a seat next to the window.  the place had free wireless so i finished up my writing and posted some photos.  i am really loving the free wireless everywhere we go, and i am also loving this laptop.  the tour leader put a damper on my spirits cause he said the other countries aren’t as wired. 

at 6pm, we left the wilde place and headed for the gun powder cellar to have dinner with the group.  the restaurant used to be a gun powder storage room for canons on top of the hill.  it was inset into the hill and was huge on the inside with very tall ceilings and two levels.  the restaurant brews their own special kind of beer called gun powder red.  supposedly they put gun powder in it, but i doubt it.  of course, i had a litre of the beveraged.  tastes like newcastle. 

so, finally i can cross off the proper estonian dinner.  i had lamb, potatoes, and feta cheese.  may sound weird, but the feta went really well with the lamb.  it was very good. 

at dinner, the discussions were mostly around the different adventures people had taken.  these people had been everywhere; south america, asia, africa, and other exotic places. it was fun to hear about their travels, and it gave us some ideas on where to go next.

after dinner, we climbed into the small bus to take us back to the hotel.  it wasn’t dark outside, but we had to wake up at 4:45am the next day so it was advised we go to bed early.  ugh, 445am.

i will say this about traveling with a bunch of older people, you get a few more luxuries such as the prearranged taxi from the restaurant to the hotel and people taking care of your bags. 

so, back at the hotel, the tour leader asked me to help him diagnose his laptop.  it never fails when i travel.  someone has a tech issue and i help them out with it.  john said i should say i’m a business man to avoid the hassle.  i don’t mind it. it is just funny that it happens wherever i go. he dropped his laptop and then error messages starting saying it couldn’t find the hard drive. well, looks like the drop cause mechanical failure in the hard drive, which pretty much spells you are SOL. we tried one trick of putting the hard drive in the freezer overnight.  the working theory is that the cold contracts the metal just enough to cause the mechanics to free up when you drop it on a hard surface. no such luck the next morning and so his laptop is now just an expensive paper weight. 

tartu was cool to see and we spent exactly enough time there to see everything.  next stop is riga, the capital of latvia.  riga is considered to be the most beautiful city of the baltics.  i was impressed with tallinn, so i’m really excited to see riga.  just don’t like to 445am wake up call.